We recently connected with Chelsea Hansen and have shared our conversation below.

Chelsea, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

We are Sasse Lake Farms, a.k.a SLF Angus Beef. We are two (cousin) farm families in southern Minnesota raising black angus beef for direct to consumer sales. What does that mean? It means our beef is raised on our family farm, processed locally and then sold directly to families in our community and/or shipped across the nation to your doorstep.

My name is Chelsea and I am one of the farm wives that make up this team of farm families and I’d love to share our farm story with you!

It’s been a wild ride getting to this place! By wild I mean fun, challenging, and crazy coupled with a whole lot of hard work. My husband, Joel, and his cousin, Erik, are 5th generation crop farmers. A few years ago when Erik graduated from SDSU and got engaged to his now wife, Jessica, the guys began talking of ways to expand the farm. Since land is difficult to acquire (expensive and highly sought after), they turned their attention to exploring new ways to utilize the land we already owned. This is where cattle entered the conversation.

Imagine, if you will, Joel coming home to his 8.5 month pregnant wife (me) and launching the idea of adding cattle to our farm with “only about 8-10 pregnant cows and one bull.” His exact words. A month later we had 50 pregnant cows and a bull. Yes, you read that right. Fifty. This is the part of the story that I like to say cattle fever took over. It seems to have the same effect as gold fever; there could always be more!

Chelsea, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We not only dove into cattle, we dropped hook, line and sinker. Hi ho, Silver! On top of it all, shortly after we brought the cattle home, Co-vid 19 hit. Now we were dealing with an ever changing market in unknown territory. But, something really amazing happened: for the first time in a long time, as food production became a new focus across the nation, people began asking where their food came from and if they could personally connect with their farmers. I think we got a little glimmer of fifty years ago when communities were more connected and people knew their farmers. It was an amazing time for us to connect with people and share our story. Throughout 2020 to present day, we have met so many amazing people and have great conversations about how we raise our beef. Through the modern tools of social media like Instagram, Facebook and a website, we have been able to actually show people how we care for our animals, what they are fed, and who we are as farm families.

It hasn’t been easy, and it’s taken all of our talents and hard work to get here, but we remain fully invested in serving and building our farm community by providing something that is good: high quality food.

This past summer we added “on-the-farm” experiences for our local communities by remodeling our barn and opening it as a beef shop and a place to host our farm events and markets. We call it, The Beef Barn! Fitting, right?! We kicked off with a fun Grand Opening event that included live music, a food truck and local vendors & artisans. It was an amazing day as we watched so many people gather on our farm to shop locally and just hang out. We look forward to more of these events this summer!

Our families are also growing alongside our business! Joel and I have two little farm boys, Asher (6) and Elias (4), and Erik and Jesscia welcomed a farm boy, Klint (1 year), to their family. It’s an amazing gift to raise our children in this life caring for the land, cattle, and our farm community.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Farming and Ranching is not an easy way of life. Any time you care for animals it means you have to show up every day regardless of the weather or how you feel. There are no sick days, down days or easy exits if everything fails. We deal with ever changing markets and there is no guarantee at the end of the day that all of our time and effort will produce the results we hope for. But in saying that, we believe that if you put in the effort and aim to serve others and provide a good and trustworthy product, good things will follow. We feel very blessed to be living this life. It is absolutely a lifestyle and not a job. Not everyone has the opportunity to farm and we are thankful to have the opportunity to raise our children here.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

If there’s anything that we’ve had to learn from owning our own business it’s that you have to be open to change and be ready to pivot otherwise you and the business itself will cease to grow. Coming from a multi-generational farm family means we’ve had to acquire new skills that our Grandparents never had use, like utilizing marketing avenues through social media to share our story. At the same time, we honor those who have come before us and build upon the foundations they’ve already laid.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.slfangus.com/
• Instagram: slfangusbeef
• Facebook: slfangusbeef

If you’d like to follow our family farm stories or try our beef, check out our website or find us on Facebook and Instagram!

Image Credits
All the photos provided are my own.